This paper investigates competition between health insurance companies under different financing regulations. We consider two alternatives advanced in recent German health care reform discussions: competition by contribution rates (health contributions) and by fees (health premia). We find that...

We consider a two-period model. In the first period, individuals consume two goods: one is sinful and the other is not. The sin good brings pleasure but has a detrimental effect on second period health and individuals tend to underestimate this effect. In the second period, individuals can...

This paper develops a general-equilibrium model of skill-biased technological change that approximates the observed shifts in the shares of wage and non-wage income going to the top decile of U.S. households since 1980. Under realistic assumptions, we find that all agents can benefit from the...

Are competitive mechanisms perceived as just sources of economic inequality? Perceptions of fairness violations can have severe economic consequences, as they may cause counterproductive behavior such as rule book slowdowns or quality shading. To analyze fairness perceptions associated with...

This paper provides a critical overview of the state of the art in the economics literature on structural reforms. It takes stock of theoretical developments, measurement efforts and of the econometric evidence. We start with a simple theoretical framework for the relationship between structural...

Empirically, the income share is procyclical for the low-income groups and acyclical for the top 5%. We find that business cycle models should consider overlapping generations and elastic labor supply in order to replicate this finding

To many economists the public's support for the minimum wage (MW) institution is puzzling, since the MW is considered a “blunt instrument” for redistribution. To delve deeper in this issue we build models in which workers are heterogeneous in ability. In the first model, the government does...

The public finance literature has modeled income shifting as a decision along the intensive margin even though it involves significant fixed costs, giving rise to an important extensive margin. We show that accounting for this extensive margin has crucial policy implications: the classical...